🍿 The Hound of the Baskervilles has had many shots at the silver screen, but the 1988 version made for the tube and starring the canonical Sherlock Holmes is yet to be topped — even with Brett being visibly bloated and sluggish from the lithium he started taking the year before.

As two of our three offspring lay in bed with fevers, a thought comes to mind: could covid have caused this never-ending chain of infections which began last fall, during which a week rarely goes by in which no one misses at least one day of school because of illness? Has it destroyed our immune systems, made us more susceptible to other infectious diseases? There is, after all, no end to articles in press both professional and lay which warn of long-term effects of SARS-CoV-2 on various lymphocyte subsets.

Well, no. Or at least highly unlikely. A 5-person household with three school-aged children will have one respiratory virus or another circulate a full two thirds of the year. With our youngest starting PK3 last fall, we have become that household, and 65% sounds about right.

Woe to us and anyone who visits our little Petri dish.

A one-two punch today for the journal Science, which while not at the very top of my to-read publications is still the “S” in CNS and therefore, I guess, important.

Punch one: trying to be more woke than the Pope; punch two: actually being — and this should come as no surprise — quite bigotted in practice. Want to submit a paper from your gmail address, you foreigner? Off with yer head.

NB: I do think small-s-science has a noise problem and have written as much. But has playing whack-a-mole ever been a good solution for anything? Or should we change incentives by removing publication count as requirement for promotion in academia and — even more importantly — clinical medicine?

Project Tailwind — Google’s answers to DEVONthink, Obsidian/Roam, and ChatGPT rolled into one — has the potential to be the best thing that has happened to academic research in decades. Of course, coming from Google, I fully expect it to be gone and forgotten in a year or so.

On the topic of firsts, here is my first Tweet, linking to a rather funny New Yorker article.

It garnered exactly one “like”, from — and this is where my trip to the archives took a dark turn — someone who is no longer with us. So it goes…

The first article I ever saved to Instapaper — 11 years ago, three years after it was created and quite some time before it turned into my personal graveyard of text — was AOL Hell from the now defunct The Faster Times The link is to the Wikipedia entry which, strangely, says that as of February 2018 the url belonged to someone in Serbia. An odd coincidence.. The titular hell is the one AOL created for the employees producing content for its text mill. Writes Oliver Miller:

My “ideal” turn-around time to produce a column started at thirty-five minutes, then was gradually reduced to half an hour, then twenty-five minutes. Twenty-five minutes to research and write about a show I had never seen — and this twenty-five minute period included time for formatting the article in the AOL blogging system, and choosing and editing a photograph for the article. Errors were inevitably the result. But errors didn’t matter; or rather, they didn’t matter for my bosses.

This is, in fact, why AI will destroy the Web as we know it. And if you have any doubts about the outcome of Large Language Models being set loose on the internet, well, AOL wanted to do it even before it was trivial, destroying a few humans in the process:

The document reveals the same attitude that the bosses at the old Ford Motors factory had, when the assembly line was first introduced. Every week or so, the assembly-line was sped up; incrementally, barely noticeably, but the increase had a staggering, cumulative effect, and soon, those workers who couldn’t keep up found themselves standing by the wayside. If AOL could find a good way for machines to write about Lady Gaga, they would almost certainly fire the writers who remain.

They now have the machines, folks… They have the machines.

Mr. Miller can now be found on Medium, writing poetry.

My decoupling from Twitter continues, with all of the 9K+ tweets now available on micro.blog. What use they could possibly have, I will leave as an exercise to the reader.

And in some positive news — can you imagine those still exist? — the US Food and Drug Agency has issued their draft guidance on decentralized trials (PDF download). America is playing catch-up with the UK in this regard, but better late than never!